The Responsible Software Engineer : Selected Readings in IT Professionalism PDF

You might expect that a person invited to contribute a foreword to a book on the 1 subject of professionalism would himself be a professional of exemplary standing.

I am gladdened by that thought, but also disquieted.

The disquieting part of it is that if I am a professional, I must be a professional something, but what?

As someone who has tried his best for the last thirty years to avoid doing anything twice, I lack one of the most important characteristics of a professional, the dedicated and persistent pursuit of a single direction.

For the purposes of this foreword, it would be handy if I could think of myself as a professional abstractor.

That would allow me to offer up a few useful abstractions about professionalism, patterns that might illuminate the essays that follow.

I shall try to do this by proposing three successively more complex models of professionalism, ending up with one that is discomfortingly soft, but still, the best approximation I can make of what the word means to me.

The first of these models I shall designate Model Zero.

I intend a pejorative sense to this name, since the attitude represented by Model Zero is retrograde and offensive ... but nonetheless common. In this model, the word "professionalism" is a simple surrogate for compliant uniformity.